


Torn at the Roots

by printers_devil



Series: In All Safe Reason [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Grinding, Healing Magic, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Mariclaude Week (Fire Emblem), Near Death Experiences, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:13:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23777416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/printers_devil/pseuds/printers_devil
Summary: When a routine mission to drive out some Imperial troops goes wrong and Marianne is grievously wounded, Claude finds himself having to be his healer's healer.Written for MariClaude Week, days 5-7: "comfort/war/healing."
Relationships: Marianne von Edmund/Claude von Riegan
Series: In All Safe Reason [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1729396
Comments: 15
Kudos: 39
Collections: MariClaude Week





	Torn at the Roots

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted this to be porn, but this did not want to be porn. So it goes. Is there established fanon on how magic works in FE3H? If there is, I don't care about it. If you look at the game animations, they use the same two sigils for every spell, so I took some license in this fic. 
> 
> Anyway, this is for Marianne/Claude Week days 5-7, "comfort/war/healing." I'm posting this a little early just to get it out of my queue. This is a good ship. More people should ship this ship. Also, Claude is fun to write.

A choir of birds woke Claude from a dead sleep. The fire had gone out during the night, and he'd fallen asleep on watch, which was both stupid and dangerous—but if he didn't die and no one saw it, it didn't count. In the morning chill, he set about packing up his bow and what few supplies he had, eating as he went. He was better off having gotten some sleep than not, he decided. He _and_ Marianne were better off.

Marianne, whom he'd carried for miles and miles the day before, and who lay on a bed of pine needles swaddled in a disgusting blanket he'd taken from a stray horse. He'd had to cut most of her bloodied clothes off of her at some point, because he wasn't Dimitri, his Crest didn't make him that much stronger than the average person, and managing the thick, armored skirts of her gremory's uniform had slowed him down. For all he'd known, there were Adrestian soldiers behind him in the forest, sweeping for stragglers to kill, or worse.

"Don't move," Claude said, when Marianne stirred. Marianne's wide eyes opened, and she blinked up at him—and she didn't move. Of all the people in all of Fódlan to get stuck with, he had to be stuck with someone who _trusted_ him, implicitly, even.

"Claude," she said softly, her voice hoarse, barely louder than a whisper. She'd spent a lot of time screaming yesterday. "Everything hurts, and my clothes are gone."

"There was a battle," Claude replied. "You remember the battle?"

"Yes, I... I suppose I do." There was doubt in her voice. "I was wounded?

"Pretty badly."

Marianne shut her eyes. "I see."

He wondered how much she could recall. Byleth's attention was elsewhere, and she'd entrusted Claude with clearing out a nest of Imperial soldiers had dug itself into a long, narrow valley close to Garreg Mach, well within range to stage an attack on the monastery. When things had gone poorly, he'd made the decision to withdraw.

He'd stayed back, covering the retreat, and Marianne had stayed with him. He hadn't had time to convince her to leave his side. A wyvern rider came at them from above, their descent almost vertical, going directly for his mage, because that was what a flying soldier was trained to do. He would have done the same. Claude had shot its rider directly between the eyes and scared the beast off, but in the process, it had raked Marianne's abdomen open, side to side.

Then there had been silence. He'd fallen to his knees next to Marianne, dredged up what little he remembered of healing magic—very little—and had somehow managed to stanch the bleeding and will her flesh to knit itself back together. He'd waited for a long, terrible moment to see if her breathing would even out, and when it did, he wanted to sink down into the soft earth and praise it for giving him the strength to make this one stupid spell work for once in his life. Then he'd hefted her in his arms and gone looking for his troops.

Claude crouched at Marianne's side as she sat up, one hand at the top of her back, bracing her. Marianne pulled the blanket open to examine the wound on her stomach: it was still red and angry-looking, and in the light of day, Claude felt more than a twinge of guilt.

"I don't know how I survived this," she said, feeling at the edges of the wound. She didn't seem to care that she was only wearing the remnants of her dress's bodice.

"I healed you," Claude said.

"Ah...." She put her hand over the horrible, puckered scab on her abdomen and frowned thoughtfully.

"Yeah?"

"This isn't very good." Marianne's face was white as a sheet, and her eyes were dull, but her voice was matter-of-fact. "It seems to me that you repaired the skin first, then the muscle and underlying viscera, then the organs that were damaged, when it should have been the other way around. I'm sorry, you'll need to fix it, or my body... will remember that it was hurt. The wounds will reopen in about an hour," she said, pressing her hands to her sides. "I can show you how to do it."

Slowly, painstakingly, she stood up and arranged the blanket about herself. He found her a stick and cleared the ground for her, and she set about drawing a hugely complex sigil in the dirt of the forest floor: a seven-pointed star inside of three perfectly symmetrical crescent moons, bounded inside a circle, inside a hexagon, which was in turn contained within a three-ringed circle, and that was just the beginning. She kept drawing with complete confidence until the mark was finished, then swayed on her feet. Claude caught her before she could crumple to the ground.

"That's the basic structure of Physic," she said. "I, ah, left a few things out and added some things, but they're not important. For you, at least. Cast at point-blank range, it should repair enough to keep me alive until we get to the physician, I hope."

"And if it goes wrong?"

"Please, don't make a mistake."

With those words, Marianne let out a huffing sigh against his chest. Was she _annoyed_ with him? If the whole cut-open-and-bleeding thing wasn't about to reprise itself, Claude might have had a little fun with that.

As it was, he had less than an hour to learn a new spell. So he set about memorizing the sigil, holding it in his mind, copying it out in the dirt. Marianne sat in his lap, curled up against the pain, and he kept one arm around her. She was so thin, like one of those little birds she fed in secret out back behind the kitchens. She corrected his errors until he was pretty sure he had it down.

"Are you ready?" she asked.

No, absolutely not. "Yep," Claude replied.

"It's okay to be afraid," Marianne said, pressing a trembling hand to his face. His beard had grown out after days on the march, and she stroked her fingers over it, smiling up at him like a statue of a Saint. "It might not work, and I might die."

She seemed awfully calm about that. It wasn't reassuring. What a time for her to be perfectly self-possessed, when Claude wanted to shake her, shout at her to care even one tiny bit about about herself. "Hey, Marianne, I'm going to need you to live," Claude said, and on an impulse, he kissed the palm of her hand. She curled her fist around the spot he'd kissed, holding it to her chest. "It's going to be a real boring march back to the monastery without you."

No response, nothing.

"It's in the Goddess's hands," she said, at last.

What _was_ it with these people and the Goddess, Claude thought, arranging Marianne and the blanket on the ground. If Fódlan's Goddess was really watching over her, over anyone, Marianne wouldn't be like this, she would have had a happy life she was determined to get back to at any cost. She was a good person who was kind to animals and had never had a harsh word for anyone, and she was going to die like _this,_ alone, far from her friends, naked, in the middle of a freezing forest, if he didn't get the spell right.

He stood over her, hands spread wide, the left raised over his head and the right stretched out over Marianne's form, the way he'd seen healers do it. This was the same as any other spell: visualize the spell's sigil, tap it into the magical currents in the air around you. Right. He knew how to do this. The sigil shimmered into existence in the air over Marianne's body, then flickered out of existence as he tried to control the flow of magic through his body. He couldn't look at her. He pictured himself pulling back on the reins of a horse—that was a metaphor Hanneman had used once, everything in magic was a metaphor, or something—and the sigil stabilized.

There was the shape of the magic set, Marianne said, he just had to tell it what he wanted it to do and direct it into her body. The right spell, the right energy, the right instructions. The sigil sank into the earth so that it rested over the ground, the blanket, Marianne's skin, like morning dew. The lines of power broke, and all of it poured into Marianne's body, lighting up the veins under her skin gold.

Then it was over. He'd expected more. Marianne was breathing, but she didn't move. Maybe it was the coward's blood in him, but for a long, terrible moment Claude did not want to approach her. If he'd made a mistake, he didn't want to know. He wanted to run, to go back to Almyra, to tell Mother that it had been fun getting to know this side of the family, but that she'd been right to leave Fódlan behind.

But he had something to do here that only he could do, and he intended to see it through, and with all his classmates at his side.

Marianne shook all over, violently, and Claude set all of this aside, fell to his knees, hauled her into his arms. "Hey," he said.

"The spell is meant to be cast on someone at range, not this close," she said, her face contorted with agony. He glanced down at her abdomen, and what he saw happening to her skin there made him look hastily back up at her face. "But it was the only way. The only way—Goddess, that's—that's quite nice? Oh, no, that's not—Claude, please—"

And then her back arched, and she groaned in pain. He held her through it, rocked her, as her tears soaked the front of his shirt and her hands clawed at him. It hadn't been this bad last time. Claude's pulse kicked up faster and faster the longer she went, and he ran through the casting of the spell in his mind, over and over. Had he misremembered the orientation of a moon, had the circles not been wide or round enough? With every sob out of her mouth, he doubted himself more and more.

Gradually, however, her writhing stopped. She took went limp in his arms. For one heart-shattering moment, she was _too_ still, and then she took a raw, gasping breath and settled. He wasn't brave enough to look at her midsection, not yet.

"Marianne," he said. "Come on, come back. Please."

Her eyes shot open, wide to the whites like a hunted animal's. Her palm shot out and hit him in the chin, a good square hit, and in surprise more than pain he went down to the ground. She had her teeth bared

Claude righted himself and pinned her securely in his arms as she tried to hit him; on her lower belly, below a wound that did not look much better than it had started, he could see a glowing light in the shape of a Crest surge, then dim. So this was the beast she was always worried about getting out. He would have found it interesting if he hadn't been trying to keep her from scratching his eyes out.

"I see you're, uh, feeling better," Claude said, and added, "you know, I usually don't do this kind of thing with someone without some lengthy negotiating first," just because he was sure Marianne wasn't at home in there.

At the sound of his voice, Marianne's struggles stopped. The light of the Crest on her belly guttered out.

"Oh!" Marianne said. "Oh, goodness, I apologize, I couldn't help it, it's the healing, my blood—you did well, the spell worked—"

Before she could finish explaining, she fainted. Claude breathed a sigh of relief. Then he gave himself ten minutes to be completely freaked out, and then hefted her in his arms again, and headed due north.

*

An army made a trail, whether it wanted to or not. Claude came on the encampment in the foothills below Garreg Mach, and the minute soldiers came into view, someone raised a cry. The next hour: Marianne was whisked away to the medic's tent. Claude got a hot meal, a stiff drink, had a hasty debrief with his captain on their losses and their scouts' reports on the Imperial troops in the valley. On paper, the situation could have been a lot worse, all things considered. He'd called the retreat just in time to prevent any more losses than there had been, but they'd still taken losses they shouldn't have.

He'd just sat down to write a missive to Byleth, staring at the paper with no idea what to write— _Hey Teach, how's it going, screwed the extremely simple mission up royally, please advise on how to fix this mess, also Marianne almost died. It's okay, she got better—_ when someone poked their head into his tent. It was the physician he'd handed Marianne off to, a short, slim person who'd been seconded to the Alliance army (such as it was) by House Goneril.

"She's asking for you," they said.

"Right," said Claude. "Right away."

She was asleep when he got there. “I've been doing what I can,” the physician explained. Marianne had been the real healer assigned to their battalion; if another soldier had come in in this condition, taking care of it would have been her job, not the physician's. Claude wasn't sure of the exact division of labor, and resolved himself to figure it out. "She lost a lot of blood."

“Yeah, I was there,” Claude said, more harshly than he intended. The physician frowned, and for once in his life, he found that he didn’t care about someone’s poor opinion of him.

The physician wandered off to check on the other patients in the tent. Marianne's color was better, and they'd gotten her out of the remnants of her dress and found her some clothes: a loose shirt, laced up the front. Someone had scraped her dirty hair into a knot atop her head. Her arms were resting atop the blankets, and he took one of her hands, the one he’d kissed before. Marianne had callused palms from lance-work: she was an able fighter, clumsy on her feet, but peerless on horseback. He’d seen her practicing with Leonie, diligently and without enthusiasm. Her nails were short and ragged from lack of care.

She twitched in her sleep, her mouth parted. On the other end of the long tent, the physician consulted with someone in low, irritated tones. Claude had half a thought to eavesdrop on them, just as a matter of principle, but exhaustion came over him all at once. Infirmary beds were wide, and no one would come looking for him here, not for a little while... across the tent, the physician sighed loudly in disgust, the person they spoke to made an apologetic sound, and the two of them stomped out into the camp.

With a swift intake of breath. She turned to him, staring as though trying to decide whether he was really there. "You came," she said, wonder in her voice.

"Of course I did," he said. "You know how many times you've saved my life? I'm just glad I got to return the favor. Sort of."

"You shouldn't have done it," she said. "I'm not worth it. It was magic you didn't fully understand, you could have tried to channel too much, you could have hurt yourself, and then my blood took me over and _I_ hurt you...."

There were tears in Marianne's voice, but not her eyes. _When did she learn to stop crying?_ Claude thought, and squeezed her hand.

"We're not having this conversation," Claude said. He was too tired for this. "You don't get to decide your worth. The world does that for you." It had decided that he was a coward because his mother's people were thought to be cowards; it had decided he was a stupid brute because his father's people were thought to be stupid brutes. It had decided that because Marianne had the wrong kind of Crest, a Crest that, okay, maybe made her freak out when her life was in real danger, she was a monster. None of it was fair, but there they were.

"Besides," he added, "you're the one who saw your own death coming and said 'Actually, you know what, no thank you, I'll pass.'"

This startled a laugh out of her, and she winced. "I suppose I did," she said. "I haven't done enough. I'd like to do more before I die."

"I'm at your service, Margrave," he said solemnly.

"Don't say that. Father isn't dead yet."

And it would certainly be a lot more convenient for both of them if he was. But, no, he didn't start offering political assassinations until he'd at least bought someone dinner. People in Fódlan were weird about poisoning, anyway. "Hey, I'm just looking to the future," Claude said. "It's all we can do, right? And your future is me letting you go to sleep."

"No," she said, tugging weakly at his hand. "Stay. Don't go. Lay with me."

"Marianne—"

"There's a spell on me to stop a fever from setting in, to make the pain... less," she said quickly, "a lot less, you won't hurt me. And my Crest knows you now. You'd never hurt me."

There were sleeping patients feet away from them, this was a terrible idea. There were a half a dozen reasons this was a terrible idea, starting with the fact Marianne was _too_ trusting, continuing with the fact that he was putting himself in a compromising position with the heir to a prominent Alliance house, and ending with the absolute certainty that wherever he laid down, he was definitely going to fall asleep. But she looked up at him with _those_ eyes, those clear grey eyes full of hope, and he found himself toeing his boots off. She made room for him, and he slid under the thin blanket with her, taking her gently into his arms.

Whoever had found her a shirt had not found her a pair of trousers. Her bare legs tangled with his, and Claude prayed to anything that was listening that he did not embarrass himself. He'd spent a whole lot of time in the past day or so holding her while she was bloodsoaked and howling with pain, and that thought was as effective a boner-killer as any.

"When I'm Margrave," she said, her voice no louder than a whisper, "I'll repay you. I swear on all the Saints: House Edmund's resources are at House Riegan's disposal."

"This is a bad time to start handing out oaths of undying loyalty."

She felt nice in his arms, though, and she could have started telling him about best horse birthing practices right now and he would have been glad to listen. He rested his chin on the top of her head, running a hand down her back, her side, feeling the dip of her waist, the swell of her hips, the... way her whole midsection was wrapped in bandages. _Focus up, Claude, think about the blood and the screaming,_ but that seemed less urgent with her pressed against him, warm and alive.

"I meant it when I said it before," he went on. "Do you even know how many times you've kept me going on the battlefield? If anything, I should be swearing fealty to you. Come on, ask your humble subject a boon."

"Well. I want you to kiss me," Marianne said. Claude stiffened in surprise, but she sounded resolute and sure.

Claude stared firmly over her head at the far end of the tent. The physician was still gone. "You're wounded. You almost died."

Marianne made that same irritated sigh she had earlier, and she put her mouth to his. As an argument, it was very persuasive. Her lips were soft, inviting, a little chapped; the person who'd cleaned the blood off of her had used a soap that smelled faintly of roses, a strange luxury to find out here in the ass end of nowhere. He breathed her in gladly, forgetting himself in her kiss. Her tongue slid into his mouth, a surprising pleasure, and he made a guttural sound in the back of his throat in response.

Claude wondered, suddenly, who'd taught her to kiss like this, and if they'd been as kind to her as she deserved. Her hand wandered over his hip, down his thigh, back up his side, to tangle in his hair as his tongue tangled with hers. He could feel her lower body, her slender legs, shifting impatiently against him, and it was the most natural thing in the world to ease one of his thighs up between hers. She rubbed herself on him enthusiastically, and he swallowed her sweet, shuddering moans in his mouth. This would be easier if he was on top of her, or if she was on top of him, it would be just a little shift, a little....

Directly across the tent from them, a wounded soldier began to snore, deep and rumbling.

"Hey," he said. She'd finished plundering his mouth and was kissing her way down his chin, headed straight for his neck. He was pretty sure he'd die if she didn't make it there, but if she did, he didn't know that he would be sensible enough to stop. "Marianne, we can't do this here."

Marianne withdrew instantly, blinking in confusion.

"Oh, Goddess," she said. "I'm so sorry, I become like this sometimes, I don't know what comes over me."

"Seems pretty obvious to me. You survived almost dying by wyvern, and now you're horny because you're glad you're alive. Also, I'm usually handsome, but I'm even more handsome when I get scruffy like this," Claude said. "Who could resist?"

He'd thought she'd blush. She didn't, and instead looked thoughtful. "Yes, that seems right," she said. She pressed a kiss to the tip of his nose. "When we get back to Garreg Mach, I'd like to continue this discussion."

"Yeah," he said. "I'd like that, too."

Reluctantly, Claude disentangled himself from her, slid out of bed, put his boots back on. When he turned back to look at her, her eyelids were heavy, but she rallied herself enough to smile up at him. He couldn't leave her, not like this, not after she'd kissed him like _that_. So he sat at her bedside until she fell asleep, until the sun went down, and until the physician shook him awake and sent him sternly off to his own tent.


End file.
